I fired up my Smartstor the other day and everything was working fine. It's RAID5 with 4x drives.
I decided to run a Check file system just for fun and it ran for a while, updating it's progress to around 50% and then the whole thing stopped responding. Nothing coming out of the NIC at all (have run wireshark captures). The power button on the back does not do anything when held down for 20+seconds. I pulled the power cable out the back of it and after several pulling power cable out the back and reseating all the drives (the NAS powers up and is accessible fine when no drives are connected), I've ascertained that Disk 3 appears to be the cause of the blocked network stack. I know it's not the direct cause as that makes little sense but all I can tell you is that when disk 3 is seated, (in any slot), the IP address of the NAS does not respond to ping and the web UI is inaccessible.
Now, if I have disk 3 unseated, what is reported in the RAID status via the webUI is very interesting; Initially, Disk4 was showing as "Free" which was very troubling as this should have been part of the RAID5 array, after several seatings of disk 3 back and power up, leave for a while, hard power down (as power button, nor web ui is working) unseat disk 3, power up, now disk 4 is showing as part of the array again and the array is showing as "Offline", rebuilding, in progress. however, I have left for several hours and the progress bar shows as 0%.
Fed up with the lack of progress, I again seated disk 3, powered up and left for a while. I reapeat the removal of disk3 and power cycle process and now when I check the array via the Web UI with disk 3 removed, rebuild progress is showing as 2%! So, I can conclude that something appears to be happening when disk 3 is seated and the WebUI/Network stack is buggered that may be progressing the rebuild?
I will report back with progress but also very keen to gain any insight from Promise or forum users about similar experiences or advice? I'm really hopeful to not lose all of this data!!